The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

98 Escaping Post-war Iceland 1948

Dad was an outlaw. After his prison sentence in the presidential residence, he tried to walk the streets unnoticed, rented a room, but got little sleep from the stones that got chucked at his window. I continued to live in the comfort of Bessastadir while he decided to move to the countryside in the east, where he traipsed across the moors in boots, drenched, with fencing wire on his shoulders.

Since the law of silence still reigned supreme in Iceland at that time, it took my father two years to understand his father’s wish for him to get out of the country. At a small party in the presidential residence on 9 September 1948, held in honour of a certain nineteen-year-old lady, Hans Henrik finally managed to read the magic word in the eyes of the hosts that was to solve the problem: Argentina.

Life in Bessastadir had become increasingly unbearable for me, too. The daughter of war, I didn’t always feel at home in Icelandic society. There was a ban on discussing anything to do with Germany, according to a tacit presidential decree. I was supposed to erase half my life. If only I could have…

But I had nowhere else to go. My mother’s home was out of bounds, and besides, Reykjavík had turned into such an endless tea party I almost loathed going into town. How that clutter of huts could have turned itself into an American film in the space of a few years was one of the enigmas of the century. Old mud-puddle streets had been paved, and everyone went into town smartly dressed. People seemed to be following an urge to strut around town, to see and be seen: women with capes and hats, veils in front of their eyes and cigarette holders in their handbags, heavily made up from Monday to Monday, and men ready for the shooting of a big film, with hats tipped over their eyes and a cigar between their lips. In stores, boys pulled fat wads of notes out of their pockets and waved them in front of old people before they paid for their comic books. And Cadillacs glided down the streets like exotic animals.

Everything had become American, all the daddies were rich and the mamas good looking.

During the war, the Yankees had taken over from the British as the protectors of Iceland, and they hadn’t left yet, despite their promises to do so. Grandad wanted to hang on to them as long as possible, being the cautious realist that he was, because otherwise there was the danger of a Soviet Iceland. Besides, no other nation had recognised Iceland’s independence in practice. Though he’d been sitting on the presidential throne for three years, no king or other country had invited him out on an official visit, apart from that good old gentleman Franklin D. Roosevelt, the summer before he died.

The Yanks took care of us for fifty years, with their soldiers, money, TV and candyfloss, and then only left after little Bush got himself into a historical muddle in Iraq. He needed all the men he could get, and the base in Keflavík was shut down in late summer 2006. Then finally, against our will and with a lot of moaning, we Icelanders became an independent nation: free and devoid of an army for the first time since 1262. That was obviously more than we could cope with, since two years later the country went bust. In the autumn of 2008, we collapsed into the arms of the Global Capitalism Rescue Team, and God only knows who will take pity on us once they discharge us from that ward.

The first winter after the war, I had tried to sit with other Icelandic kids in high school (most of them were two years younger than I was), girls who judged boys on the strength of their stamp collections and boys who drank milk at parties. To me the girls were children, and the boys did it in their pants if I drew close to them. I had to make do with fifty-year-old men, such as the occasional drunken ambassador who would stumble into my room while looking for the toilets at a cocktail reception in Bessastadir.

Life had once more put me up against the wall. And given me two options: to prolong my boredom in Bessastadir or go with Dad to Argentina.